


Gold

by Flowers47



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M, Growing as People, Infertility, Love, The Bad Times and The Good
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-12
Updated: 2015-08-12
Packaged: 2018-04-14 09:08:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4558881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flowers47/pseuds/Flowers47
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spock and Uhura have a talk. Inspired by my own experiences of how having/wanting/being able to have children impacts women's self-identity and social identities.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gold

**Author's Note:**

> A little shorty about identity, and how it's tied to the ability and inclination to have children. Partially inspired by Here, by humancredentials (http://archiveofourown.org/works/3249947).

“Spock”

He doesn’t look up from where he’s reading on their couch, but she knows that he’s heard her by the way he tilts his head slightly in her direction. 

“Spock, are you sterile?”

He turns his face toward her, moving only his head, and lowers his PADD, eyes wide but expression otherwise unchanged. She’s sitting at her desk to the left of the couch, her body facing him, legs swung uncomfortably over the chair’s edge. They are bathed in a pool of golden light in a quiet moment between shifts. The light is coming from hundreds of tiny lights that are recessed into the walls around the molding that signals the end of the wall and the beginning of the ceiling and it strikes her, suddenly, how absurd it is to be sitting in light in this color that hasn’t come from a sun. The light is such a carefully constructed color. It’s hot too, as hot as it always is in their quarters, and the air is a thick, smooth cloth wrapped around them. It’s heavy, and humid, and dense, and it makes it just that bit harder to breath, which is wonderful but suffocating. She feels as though the sun has just set and she is sitting under the African sky, but she’s not. She’s sitting, uncomfortably, in a chair on a spaceship two point 5 million light years away from the sky.

“I…I do not…that is to say, my heritage is unusual, but has been replicated many times in Terran history-”

“Spock, a simple yes or no, please.”

“Why do you inquire?” He is earnest, concerned. His eyebrows have drawn together infinitesimally and Nyota sees fear in his fondue eyes. She is suddenly embarrassed, and looks away.

“I just know that most hybrids are. Like you said, cross-species mating has occurred many times, but the offspring rarely go on to have children of their own. It’s just, I mean, biologically speaking-“

“Yes.” He blurts out. The word moves slowly through the density of the room and at the same time arrives far too soon. 

She is taken aback; she was expecting this answer, but expecting it and having it confirmed are two different things.

“Yes?”

“Yes. I am infertile.”

“Oh.” They stare at one another. Nyota doesn’t know what to say. She turns back to her desk and breaths the hot, sticky, golden air. Internally, she is cursing herself. She knew she shouldn’t have asked; Spock hates talking about his mixed genes. It’s just the heat, the damned heat. She looks at him out of the corner of her eye. He is turned back to his PADD, but Nyota can tell that he’s not reading by the way that he is breathing. She knows him inside and out, she doesn’t even think about what he’s experiencing anymore because she can just sense it. He’s practicing one of his meditative breathing techniques. 

They continue in silence. 

She can’t stand it.

She gets up and strides quickly over to her lover, cradles his face in her hands, and bends to kiss him. Spock rises into her touch, and for a moment they are poised awkwardly between standing and sitting. She takes a step back, still wrapped around him and he follows her, drawing her near. Nyota pushes everything at him, using the connection to say what cannot be said out loud.

I love you, I need you, I don’t care that we can’t have children, I don’t need them, all that I need is you you you you I’m not unhappy I’m not sad I didn’t mean to make you feel like you aren’t enough you are everything I love you.

It’s you, it’s you, it’s you. 

 

A month and a half later, she braces herself against the bathroom door with one forearm, clutching a pregnancy test in the other, and sobs.


End file.
